Derek Fun Reel

So I finally came up with a finished product with all the filming I've been doing. Overall, I'm pretty happy with it. I learned a lot about myself and how I move doing this in a way that I could not have without the camera. It's a useful medium and allowed me to fix up a lot of my misshapen movement patterns. I would totally suggest this as a theme for training for a week or so just to see how it affects one's training.

Objective/subjective

I made a video the other day for halloween because I made a spiderman mask and figured it shouldn't go to waste.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8aFsYQRFhHU
Funny thing is that it helped me realize the discrepancy between what it feels like I'm doing and what is actually happening. While I can attribute a lot of the awkwardness to my lack of full vision, I've noticed discrepancies in other video footage where I'm moving a lot more slowly than I figured. I've managed to connect stuff from my philosophy studies with my unique problem and am realizing a solution. My subjective experience of how I'm moving is slightly off with how it objectively looks in the camera. This is only a problem since it has the potential to limit my technique on certain progressions. The goal is to align my subjective experience with the objective. Therefore, i'll be taking a lot more footage. I've noticed that this is an interesting way to train too since I'm forced to do my runs full speed, over and over again, most importantly with good form. This is actually how I thought I was training before but the footage shows clearly not. Overall, I'm simply saying that a camera can serve as an incredibly useful tool.

Freedom and discipline

I really started to move when I learned about this thing called parkour. Even in the beginning I didn't really adhere to any sort of ideology about overcoming obstacles as quickly and efficiently as possible. Instead, I did what was fun and what I saw in the videos on youtube that inspired me. I'm still inspired by the evolution of movement that people are displaying. For me, it's been more about fluidly overcoming obstacles in the environment, having that kind of finesse regardless of whether or not it was the fastest, most effective way to go about things.

Familiarity with my body is what I learned when I chose to really delve into the ideology of fast, efficient, and striving for a sort of perfection in my movements. I still couldn't let the really fun part go though. There was still a creative outlet there where I could take my movement to the next level in gymnastics and other acrobatic art forms.

I've balked at the idea of calling myself a "freerunner" simply because what I saw in others who called themselves that was not what I saw in myself. To me, walking up to a ledge, busting a flip off of it, walking to another, spinning off of that one, then walking to another, etc. is missing something really important. I'm glad that when I started, my movements were based solidly in the basic parkour techniques so that I had a working physical knowledge for how to get around my environment safely. Though I jumped into the acrobatic stuff a little too quickly in the beginning, not having a reckless, throw myself off of stuff mentality made me a better, more mindful practitioner. For the sake of communication, although I view all of the movements I do as parkour, I'll talk about other disciplines using the names they've been given.


I guess I don't like the idea of being limited with my movement so that I do things in only the most "get my ass outta there" manner. Is my version of parkour (call it freerunning to avoid confusion) a discipline like that whole go from point A to point B thing? I think it should be. I'm all for freedom of movement but without the correct, disciplined training, people will end up being really free to go to the hospital

Breaking jumps

     Okay so admittedly I heard of the term "breaking a jump" from the parkour generations guys. Breaking a jump just means basically getting yourself to do a jump that you're having difficulty going through with. When I say  "jump" it can be anything involving having to traverse to something with a bit of air time, be it a cat leap, kong to precision, or even just a plain old precision.
  
     Only yesterday did I realize that I had tried and true methods for breaking a jump. I had been using them subconsciously for years now but it never occurred to me to take a more systematic approach. Breaking a jump can take a lot of time (or none at all if you get enough practice in). This problem comes up when the physical reality of a jump doesn't match up with limitations set up within one's mind.

    For the most part, you know you can make the jump, but you can't get yourself to do it. You'll stand on the ledge or railing and look at your landing point, get off, look away, get back on, stare for a bit, get off, etc. It's frustrating to say the least. It's all about freeing your mind. If you can broad jump something on the ground, that distance is immutable. It doesn't change, 10ft on the ground is 10ft anywhere else. There's a logical process to make your mind realize this but it requires that you override your instincts and understand your ability. You must learn to trust yourself.

There are several ways to break a jump:


Break it down into its subsequent parts
You've got your take off, air time, and landing to figure out separately. If you can do all of those safely and individually then you can bet that you've got it all together. Sometimes just knowing how that landing is going to feel will aid in the jump.

Do a progression if you're worried about the distance.
That's right, so what if it's a 30ft jump? Start out with 2ft and move up incrementally however you feel comfortable. The prevailing thought at the time should be something like "well, I can do it at this distance, what's a foot more?"
That's how you find and push your limits.

Finally, visualize!
Chances are you've been doing this throughout the entire process but not in the most conducive way. You're visualizing what it would look like to not make it and get horribly maimed. This is where your awareness must kick in (if it hasn't already). If you think about how you're going to fall, you probably will. See the right way to do it, where your body position will be in the air. Remember  how everything feels. It's possible to do a jump 100 times perfectly without getting fatigued or anything if you can see those repetitions in your mind. That's the power of visualization. It allows you to train so much harder that your body would allow.

If after all of these methods, you still can't bring yourself to do it, the damn thing is probably too far and it's time to save it for another day and move on. Don't ever be discouraged if you really tried everything and couldn't do it. Instead make the jump a motivational tool which you can use to help you train for the day that you do make it.

Eventually you'll get to the point where it's not you that jumps, but that jumping itself happens to occur and you're there to experience it.